Movie rant coming up. No plot spoilers... if you've seen the trailer(s), or read the comic or otherwise heard talk what the movie is generally about, you can read on with no worries. Trust me.
Soo... Saw the X-Men: Days of Future Past yesterday. I liked it. It's very entertaining, solid superhero/action flick. I didn't glimpse my watch (well, phone... since I haven't had a wrist watch in years) one time during the film. And when the credits rolled on the screen, I got up and walked out the theater feeling happy about the fact that I had seen the film...
... and then I started thinking about the time-travel stuff.
Now, I'm pretty sceptical about the whole idea that you could go back in time in any shape or form and fix something and things would go *poof* in the future and everyhing else would stay just the same. I think your mere existence in the past would cause ripple effects in the future: every item you'd touch, every person you'd interact with, quite literally every breath you'd take. All those things would cause tiny changes, tiny ripples that would get bigger and bigger until they would end up shaping the future dramatically... and the further back you'd go, the bigger ripple effects you would create. If you'd go back five minutes to buy a different flavour Oreos than you originally did, that wouldn't change the future much... but if you'd go back, say 20 years to do the same... now, that would be more tricky.
Also, in order to minimize the ripple effects, you'd have to do a real pin-point job, "go in, do your thing, get out", 3 seconds tops... And trust me, those pesky X-Men didn't exactly do that. Instead they mucked about in the past for several days destroying property and causing people all sorts of physical and mental trauma... and that doesn't have ANY effect in the future? Uh-huh!
You'd also have to think about the inevitable side-effects of your actions. For example, if you'd go back and convince Henry Ford to make cars with three tires, you wouldn't come back to the same future, only with three-wheeled cars. Your action would affect car manufacturing, tire manufacturing, employment in the automotive industry, design, traffic safery, advertising etc. etc.
The bottom line I'm trying to make here is that you couldn't go back and change just one thing and leave everything un-affected. I just woudn't WORK that way!
*pant... pant... pant*
But as I said in the beginning. I liked the movie...
...and I can recommend it to all superhero movie fans... just... don't think too hard about time-travel stuff. Okay?
PS. Quicksilver is awesome.
Cheerio.
